Martina Castro

Martina Castro is the Managing Editor of KALW News. She started her career in journalism as an intern at National Public Radio in Washington D.C., and worked with NPR as a producer, trainer, and freelancer before coming to KALW. Martina's independent work has been featured nationally on NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Day to Day, as well as the online radio magazine The [Un]Observed.

On KALW’s Crosscurrents, Martina has produced stories gauging the impact of the recession on the Bay Area, and also has focused on the arts like in her series The Audiophiles, a wide-range of conversations with creative people working in sound around the Bay. She also edited and produced The Fault Lines, an award-winning series about the roots and solutions to violence in Oakland. Martina likes to work in audio even in her free time – she makes radio in Spanish as senior producer of the new podcast Radio Ambulante, is a sound artist and designer for local art installations, and she sings with the San Francisco Latin rumba reggae band MakrÃº. She’s also known to go out for an occasional surf.

Uruguay boasts that it has the longest Carnival celebration not just in Latin America, but the world. The 40-day celebration is dotted with makeshift stages all around the capital city of Montevideo for performances of choral music called murga. Murga is both entertainment and a sociopolitical commentary that survived the military dictatorship of the 1970s.